Wednesday, March 6, 2013

Glamour Magazine By Debbie Seaman: The radio show 26-year-old Ananada Tiller was listening to in her car
one day last year seemed innocent: The announcer was reporting on a
children's balloon-blowing contest. Yet it triggered a memory so jarring
that Tiller served over a median.
As a deejay described how the children's cheeks ached from blowing up
the balloons, Tiller recalled a time when, at six years old, her own
cheeks ached with pain. But it was not from inflating balloons. Tiller,
she found herself remembering, had been tied to a chair as a man forced
his swollen penis into her mouth. The scene Tiller describes allegedly
took place in 1981 while she was living in a gurukula, one of the 11
ashram-based boarding schools across the nation for children whose
parents were members of the Hare Krishna religious sect. The assault,
Tiller says, happened in a garage where Krishna devotees made candles to
sell on the street. She remembers the same man dipping his fingers into
wax and using them to probe her vagina.
Although her parents removed her from the gurukula at around age 10,
Tiller charges that the physical scarring from the abuse may result in
her needing to have a partial hysterectomy. But the emotional scarring
is what she is struggling most to heal. It's why she has joined the
nearly 100 others who claim they suffered at the hands of the Krishnas
in a $400 million lawsuit
again the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), the
founding organization of the Hare Krishnas, which has an estimated one
million members worldwide and 75,000 in the United States and Canada.
(The movement, founded by Indian guru Srila Prabhupada in 1966, sought
to promote peace and love and became popular in the American hippie
culture of the sixties and seventies.) The lawsuit, filed in June 2000,
alleges widespread sexual, physical and emotional abuse of young
children at many of the 11 gurukulas in the United States, primarily
between 1972 and 1990. The plaintiffs maintain that Hare Krishna
children were subjected to various types of child abuse, including rape,
beatings and improper medical care. The suit also alleges that children
were often denied food and confined inside trash barrels and frequently
moved to other schools without their parent's knowledge.
Young girls like Tiller who lived in these gurukulas were particularly vulnerable to violation says Nori J. Muster, author of Betrayal of the Spirit
(University of Illinois Press), an autobiography of her years as a
Krishna. "Girls were married off as young as age 12 to men about three
times their age," says Muster. "Since Krishna authorities often allowed
men to hit their wives for misbehavior, a girl was at the mercy of her
husband."
Although the case against the Krishnas may not go to trial for another
year or more, the mere filing of the suit has helped former Krishna
children mend their lives says Windle Turley, the plaintiff's attorney
in Dallas who is best-known for winning a $120 million child-abuse suit
against the Roman Catholic Church in 1997. "It helps victims feel
validated," Turley explains. ISKCON's attorneys neither confirm nor deny
that abuse took place at the gurukulas. Individual Krishna devotees,
however, are being tried in court for these crimes. This summer, a man
pleaded guilty to sexually abusing two girls and a woman at a Krishna
community in the late 1980s and was sentenced to eight months in prison.
Turley's suit, though, could have a far broader impact. "If the
plaintiffs win it will wipe out the religion's existence," says David
Liberman, a Krishna and an attorney for ISKCON.

The Appeal of Religion

You've probably seen Krishnas-men and women dressed in robes, chanting,
passing out literature in airports and other public places, panhandling
for change. Founding guru Prabhupada encouraged parents to leave their
children in the sect's gurukulas so that the parents could devote
themselves to spreading the Krishna work and raising money for the
movement. The absence of parents, however, is one reason that abuse
became prevalent, according to research by E. Burke Rochford, a
sociology professor at Middlebury College in Vermont. "Krishna followers
were taught to put religion ahead of family," notes Rick Ross, a cult
expert in Jersey City, New Jersey. "They believed that sending their
children away was best for the children as well as for the group."
So three-year-old Vilasini Silverman's parents were simply following
their leader's doctrine when they sent their daughter to the Dallas
gurukula in 1972 while they remained in Los Angeles to head the large
Krishna temple there. "Our routine was to wake up at 4 A.M. and take
cold showers," says Silverman of boarding school life. "The children
then spent hours praying and chanting before breakfast, which was served
on waxed paper on the floor, she continues. "The food frequently had
bugs in it, but we risked punishment if didn't eat it."
In 1976, state school authorities closed the Dallas gurukula. For four
years, Silverman and her older sister, Chandra, traveled with their
parents back and forth between India and the United States and were
rarely enrolled in school. But the nightmare of living in a gurukula
began again for Silverman in 1980, when her parents moved to Saudi
Arabia for work, leaving the children behind. This time, the experience
was even more traumatic. Silverman recalls that at barely 13, she was
attending a Krishna festival in 1982 in West Virginia when a devotee she
knew who was in his late twenties invited her and a friend to see a
waterfall nearby. As they descended into a ravine, Silverman realized
that her friend had turned back. "That's when [the man] threw me down on
the ground and raped me," Silverman charges. She says she remembers the
anise aroma of Indian toothpaste on his breath as he pushed up her sari
and forced himself between her legs. "I had no idea what he was doing."
The man never uttered a word and afterward rushed back to the festival,
Silverman says. According to her, he was never charged with the crime-in
fact, she was made to feel guilty. Her teachers accused her having
lured the man to have sex with her, she says; as a result, they forbade
her to speak to anyone or to leave the temple grounds for three months.
Then, five months later, her mother came to take her to India to marry a
devotee 11 years her senior, says Silverman.
Compared to Silverman's gurukula existence, married life wasn't so bad.
Her husband never beat her, and she considered that a blessing. But hope
disappeared when he divorced her a year later. She ended up at a temple
in India, where she says she was raped by a worker. "" had absolutely
no self-worth, no value. The rape made no difference to me," she says.
Being a victim was all Silverman knew. "When you grow up in a isolated
environment of sexual abuse, you believe repeated abuse is normal,
especially when you're a child," says cult expert Ross.
Krishna leaders say they are opposed to these violent acts. "It's not
part of our spiritual teaching to abuse children," says Druta-karma
Dasa, a member of the Los Angeles Krishna chapter. "We want to prevent
this." Still, he adds, "if men are put together with women in certain
situations, they might do things they might not otherwise do."
Silverman believes the abuse she suffered was encouraged by the Krishna
religion. Says Ross: "Women are devalued by the Krishnas. Krishna women
are even told that their brains are smaller than men's brains."
("Biologically, women's brains are smaller than men's," says Svavasa
Dasa, the Los Angeles Krishna Temple president.) Anutama Dasa, ISKCON''
communications director, points out that the Krishna religion, unlike
some other faiths, permits women to hold positions as high as men do.
When she was 15, Silverman escaped from the Krishnas for good. Now a
32-year-old wife and mother of three, she lives with her family in
Gaithersburg, Maryland, a tranquil suburb of Washington, D.C. But the
suffering she endured as a child has left scars. "Some days I feel at
peace, strong and secure," she says. "But most days I just want to crawl
into a hole and hide."

A Paradise for Predators

Along with being separated from their parents, children in the gurukulas
were typically separated from outside figures such as doctors and
social workers, who might have been able to identify the violence,
according to the lawsuit. "By isolating the children and not allowing
conventional medical care, there was no way for the abuse to be
recognized," Ross says. The abuse was also hidden from parents, the
lawsuit states. Elaine Romero, a former Krishna member whose daughter,
Melody Romero-Gedeon, attended a gurukula, says she got many letters
from Melody but that none hinted at trouble. "That's because our teacher
would print on the board what we were supposed to write to our
parents," explains Romero-Gedeon, 31, a massage therapist in Miami and a
plaintiff in the suit.
The isolation was made worse because the teachers weren't necessarily
good with children. In fact, they were made teachers mainly because they
weren't skilled at raising money, former members claim. Still, Krishna
leaders maintain that this fact doesn't make ISKCON responsible for the
abuse. "We were let down by some of the people responsible for child
care education," says temple president Svavasa Dasa.
Tiller says she felt isolated when she entered the gurukula at age four.
Across the street, "you could see children playing baseball. I loved
their clothes, particularly their bathing suits, says Tiller, who was
almost always dressed in a sari.
But in her world, she charges, there was persistent violence. "One boy
was put in a trash can with a sock in his mouth, which was then
duct-taped shut," she recalls. When a guru discovered that Tiller had a
Barbie doll (she'd found it in the garbage), she was beaten with a belt,
Tiller says.
But the sexual abuse Tiller says she suffered caused the most pain. One
reason: When it came to sexual offenses, Krishnas often put the blame on
the female, say both Ross and former Krishna Muster. "One man made me
perform oral sex, then spit on me to purify himself because I'd made him
sin," Tiller recalls.
Although it was "normal" for girls to marry at around puberty, Tiller's
parents refused to let a 30-year-old recruit marry Tiller when she was
10. But he followed Tiller around and made her watch him masturbate, she
says.
Tiller's parents removed her and her brother from the gurukula and moved
them to a Krishna farm in Oklahoma. The family left the Krishnas for
good when Tiller was 11, but "I was throwing myself out of cars because I
couldn't put the abuse behind me," she says. At age 15, Tiller checked
into a psychiatric hospital because of suicidal tendencies. Although she
thought she was getting better, a year later she screamed at her
boyfriend when he made amorous advances. He knew about her past and
insisted she get help. "Only then did I realize I couldn't just jump
into the real world," says Tiller, now a divorced mother of two. "My
past was following me wherever I went."

Could it Happen Today?

ISKCON insists it's trying to prevent future abuse. In 1990, the
international governing body of Krishnas resolved to create child
protection teams a its almost 400 temples. But when asked whether such
teams are in place, Anuttama Dasa, ISKCON's communications director, can
only say, "That was the policy. They were supposed to be there." About
three years ago, the religion's Child Protection Office was created to
provide financial support to victims and to investigate alleged past and
present abuses. But Dasa won't reveal how much money the office has
given to victims.
The Child Protection Office aims, among other thins, to stop the policy
of teaching children than even hugging is "subtle sex." Says Melody
Romero-Gedeon, "I thought I was perverted because I liked it when my mom
kissed me on the cheek."
And like Silverman, who alleges that she was blamed for provoking a man
to rape her, Romero-Gedeon felt shame for the violence committed against
her. "When I confided in my teacher that a devotee put his hand inside
my underwear, she told me I incited him by acting like a prostitute,"
she recalls. Says Druta-karma Dasa of the L.A. chapter, "Obviously, that
teacher was wrong."
Despite the abuse, Romero-Gedeon followed the religion until two years
ago. "It was all I knew," she says. She credits her husband whom she met
in 1995, for helping her disaffiliate. Her real moment of truth came
two years ago when she attended a Krishna festival and noticed a teacher
scolding a young girl. "Her chin quivered," Romero-Gedeon says. "I
suddenly saw myself in that little girl, and for the first time I cried
for myself."
Elaine Romero, Romero-Gedeon's mother, says she feels terrible guilt for
putting her daughter in such a situation. "I thought she would get a
great education," says Romero, who left the Krishnas two years ago.
Romero-Gedeon still has a fear of the dark and of roaches, the result of
being forced to sleep in a garage, she says. "I ask my husband ho he
fell in love with me. He says, 'Because I could see you in there honey! I
just had to take you out of that negative environment.'"

The Road to Recovery

As a result of the lawsuit, Silverman, Tiller and Romero-Gedeon have
become friends and have created a support network for survivors. In
July, the three women picketed local Fourth of July Krishna gatherings,
carrying signs with declarations like ISKCON Rapes Its Women and
Children. They talked to both Krishnas and onlookers, and Romero-Gedeon
says she even persuaded one woman not to join ISKCON.
"Demonstrating empowered us," says Silverman. "It made us feel like we
have a voice and that our lives, unlike what the Krishnas may say,
aren't worthless."

How Sects Endanger Girls

Many religious groups have been linked to child abuse, and often it's young girls who are the victims.
The Branch Davidians
Numerous ex-Davidians claim that leader David Koresh sexually abused young girls, and former member Kiri Jewell
testified that Koresh began having sex with her when she was 10. Koresh
also fathered a child with his wife's 14-year-old sister because he was
"commanded" to in a vision, according to David Thibodeau, co-author of
[a book about the Waco Davidians].
The Children of God
Through his writings, called the "Mo Letters," founder David Brandt Berg
advocated having sex with prepubescent girls, says cult expert Rick
Ross. Berg fled to England in 1971 after a New York crime commission
accused him of numerous offenses, including child molestation. Never
indicted, he died in 1994.
People's Temple
Young girls in this cult were forced to strip and perform sexual acts in
front of group members, says Kenneth Wooden, author of "The Children of
Jonestown" (McGraw-Hill). Temple founder Jim Jones wasn't trying to
punish the girls, Wooden says; he was punishing their parents for
violating cult rules, including those barring escape.